Where do non-biblical stories of lucifer, lilith, varioius angels etc. come from?
Camilla Cracchiolo
There is a vast body of stories about Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion
that do not appear in the Bible, Torah or Koran. For example, the
story of the war in heaven, Lucifer's fall, the story of Lilith AND
her various demonic offspring the Lilim (which kind of doesn't make
sense that there would be any Lilim since she was damned to have all
her children die by the end of the day, but oh well...)
Also the names of various angels, what their heavenly duties are, what
their rank in heaven is, what they are made of. The same with the
demons and djinn.
Where does all this stuff come from? More to the point, where is it
written down? Does it come from the Kabala? The Midrash? The Talmud?
The Hadith?
And where can I find these stories? Is a copy of the Kabala a good
place to start? Are there condensed versions of things like the
Midrash, Talmud and Hadith (which I understand run to dozens of
volumes in complete editions) that might have these stories? And
which a person who is not interested in all the fine points of Jewish
and Islamic law might be able to read?
Or should I look to books on folklore and if so, can you give me some
titles to start with? Any recommendations?
Thanks.
___________________________________________________
Camilla Cracchiolo
Registered Nurse
Los Angeles, California
cami...@mindspring.com webpage temporarily down
Masked Debator
easy enough to obtain.)
Apparently on date Sun, 15 Aug 2004 22:15:40 -0700, Camilla Cracchiolo
English1413
>easy enough to obtain.)
Milton provides interesting ideas on all this, but I don't think he's the
originator. For example, a couple hundred years before Milton, Thomas Aquinas
covered most of it. Various other early Christian writers discuss it. The
ultimate source seems to be oral tradition.
Gray
Larry Caldwell
@mindspring.com (Camilla Cracchiolo) says...
> There is a vast body of stories about Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion
> that do not appear in the Bible, Torah or Koran. For example, the
> story of the war in heaven, Lucifer's fall, the story of Lilith AND
> her various demonic offspring the Lilim (which kind of doesn't make
> sense that there would be any Lilim since she was damned to have all
> her children die by the end of the day, but oh well...)
The majority of Judeo-Christian angel lore comes from the Book of Enoch,
which didn't make the Bible, but is famous apocrypha and available at
any bible bookstore. Before the Roman Empire imposed a rigid doctrine
on Christianity, it was a much richer religion. Take a look at _The
Other Bible_ by Willis Barnstone, which collects the entire body of non-
canonical apocrypha and mystery texts.
http://www.harpercollins.com/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0062500309
Much of the Lilith lore dates to the last 30 years. It is an artifact
of the radical women's movement. A female demon plays well to an
extremist political crowd.
Djinn come from Greco-Roman mythology. The ancient Greeks believed some
people had a private spirit, or 'daemon' that guided them in their
lives. The Roman word for this private spirit was 'genius', and the
plural of genius, of course, is 'genii'. That's where the word came
from. Combine that with the animist native religion of the Arabian
peninsula, and you will find that everything has a djinn. _1001 Arabian
Nights_ is a popular source on Djinn.
chris
Enoch - which Larry mentions, extrapolates its story from Genesis 6,
where the sons of heaven (who in Enoch become the Watchers/fallen
angels) lay with the daughters of man and have offspring who are
giants (Nephilim), the heroes of old...
The Enoch story has the Watchers as deliverers of knowledge the arts of
civilization - simultaneously useful and dangerous. This is a similar
theme to earlier stories from Sumer involving Enki, to the Greek
Prometheus/Epimetheus stories and to Genesis 2, with the serpent and
the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Larry Caldwell wrote:
> Much of the Lilith lore dates to the last 30 years. It is an artifact
> of the radical women's movement. A female demon plays well to an
> extremist political crowd.
>
Eh... I'd not dismiss it that easily. There's a fair amount of
older material on Lilith out there. Try Alan Humm's site for
an overview & pointers:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/humm/Topics/Lilith/lilith.html
> Djinn come from Greco-Roman mythology. The ancient Greeks believed some
> people had a private spirit, or 'daemon' that guided them in their
> lives. The Roman word for this private spirit was 'genius', and the
> plural of genius, of course, is 'genii'. That's where the word came
> from. Combine that with the animist native religion of the Arabian
> peninsula, and you will find that everything has a djinn. _1001 Arabian
> Nights_ is a popular source on Djinn.
In between the Romans and the Nights the Djinni appear in the Koran
as creatures made of subtle fire, contrasting with humans made of
clay earth.
Chris Siren http://home.comcast.net/~chris.s
Masked Debator
said:
>This is a similar
>theme to earlier stories from Sumer involving Enki, to the Greek
I'd be keen to learn more about these. :)
Larry Caldwell
Bill....@MSN.com (Masked Debator) says...
You will need to read Sitchin, which is a bit much for most people. Who
knows, maybe you are one of the flaky few who can swallow Sitchin whole?
Good luck on that.
Masked Debator
<lar...@teleport.com> said:
Ah, well, Sitchin presents a wholly incorrect picture w.r.t. the cosmology,
orbits, science and archaeology, so I won't even try using him as a source for
information on early literature, a field in which I am less equipped to spot
incorrect information.
So to speak.
chris
Please! I'm talking about Enki and the "me" which are hardly
12th planet Sitchin flakiness. The "me" were the sundry
arts of civilization. Try "Enki, Inanna and the 'me'". There's
a Samuel Noah Kramer translation and there's a more recent
translation at:
http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcslmac.cgi?text=t.1.3.1&charenc=j#
Chris Siren
chris
Please! I'm talking about Enki and the "me" which are hardly
Masked Debator
said:
>Larry Caldwell wrote:
>> In article <u905i0p126aarsc17...@4ax.com>,
>> Bill....@MSN.com (Masked Debator) says...
>>
>>>Apparently on date Tue, 17 Aug 2004 12:30:16 -0400, chris <chr...@comcast.net>
>>>said:
>>>
>>>>This is a similar
>>>>theme to earlier stories from Sumer involving Enki, to the Greek
>>>
>>>I'd be keen to learn more about these. :)
>>
>> You will need to read Sitchin, which is a bit much for most people. Who
>
>Please! I'm talking about Enki and the "me" which are hardly
>12th planet Sitchin flakiness. The "me" were the sundry
>
>http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcslmac.cgi?text=t.1.3.1&charenc=j#
Ok, this is interesting. The above, to my mind, boils down to a tale where
wisdom is passed from the wise, to the young, using characters which can be
found in any city (indeed, a pack of primates brachiating through the trees
would have these characters in their troupe, even if they lack the means to
describe them to us, e.g. a "trickster" character isn't signs of a connection
to some other mythos with a trickster in it.)
I find nothing particularly indicative about the characters in the above
rendering nor do I think there is anything noteworthy about the theme, i.e.
wisdom passing from the old and wise to the young and receptive.
This sort of tale, in versions that are bound to "grow in the telling" into
traditional forms, would be cropping up all over the place, I'd imagine, and
doesn't need to diffuse.
I did navigate to http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/humm/Topics/Lilith/gilgamesh.html
which is listed as a Kramer translation of a prologue to the Epic.
This is quite different - if valid, and there seems some doubt particularly
about the name used. Given we probably recognise that Jewish stories at least
to some extent originate in, well, Babylon, it seems quite probable to me that
the tree, serpent, tempter and bird are all related in some way to the tree in
the garden of Eden, but the events are so different it is hard to see how.
I would wonder if there is a range of translations and a story that changes
considerably to be more like the one which ended up in Genesis?